David Stinson's approach to technology is altogether human: he learns alongside the children instead of instructing them the traditional way. At Sullivan upper school in Holywood, Co. Down, secondary-level technology students have fully embraced the brave new world of the e-portfolio.

Electronic files, images, multimedia, blog entries, hyperlinks and soundbytes are all "dropped" into documents and PowerPoint presentations in David's technology class to explain an "entire" process of learning, not just the end product.

"I really wanted a break from the hammering-a-nail philosophy to what technology could be," he says. "Five years ago, I got involved in the whole area of e-learning and I've been running fast after myself ever since."

Three years ago, the General Teaching Council for Northern Ireland awarded him a bursary to develop his work, and he has worked in partnership with both Ulster University and Stranmillis University College to study the impact of e-portfolio use on pupils' learning.

"By using video and audio diaries and much more besides, the kids can reflect on trials and tribulations they've encountered during the learning process," says Stinson. "I will set a project that sounds simple enough: build a model of a stage, design a bird-cage, and so on, but how the students apply themselves to that process is where the real curve learning is."

Sullivan Upper is a traditional grammar school with 1,060 pupils and 184 in the prep department (fee-paying primary school). The school is famed for its vast array of extra-curricular activities: literary, drama, debating, over two dozen sports and 30 different groups of music, from junior woodwind to senior orchestra. The traditional music group, for instance, has been invited to perform in Washington on St Patrick's Day 2011, playing at a function on Capitol Hill.

Stinson believes some of his students will make serious headway in the technology field yet. For a recent project, one of Stinson's technology students decided he'd try a "bluescreen" filmmaking technique where he and his friends could play in a band and later superimpose the video clip of their efforts. This demanded shooting foreground action against an evenly-lit monochromatic background (usually blue) and later removing the background from the scene and replacing it with an image from their stage model.

"I am very open-minded when it comes to the students' ideas," he says. "Once I give them the basic learning tools, skills, confidence and approach, they can then innovate. Even if ideas are wacky and original, even if they fail, I respect their decision to go ahead. Students also need to fully write up these projects too, at a later stage, but you want the creative juices to flow without any impediments.

"We didn't have a big blue wall here in school, so the kids used a type of Blue Peter approach and brought in blue sleeping bags, pinned them to the wall and filmed themselves miming instruments. Music was added later and the entire thing superimposed on to their stage model for use at the press of a button. It was brilliantly impressive."

Stinson believes strongly in an ethos and expectation of pushing boundaries. "It is how we'll get out of recession," he says. "We need to break off into the unknown and the unique if we're going to truly compete with tech-destinations such as China and Japan."

He cites an example of a student who left the school and set up an ethical clothing business in China at the age of 19, using various strands of new technology out there to achieve his goal. "He now runs a successful business and I want the children to know that evenwhen their ideas begin small, they really do have the potential to grow into acceptable industry standards," affirms Stinson.

The real benefit of using e-portfolios is that every student, regardless of ability, can adapt to the dynamic nature of recording their thoughts and emotions in video and audio, removing some of the anxiety involved in pen and paper communication. For students with special needs this can be especially constructive, as the unique nature of expression in e-portfolios takes away the need to endlessly compare to their classmates.

"I had a student with Asperger's who had bad handwriting, terrible spelling, poor drawing skills ... he was terribly self-critical as soon as he put pen to paper," explains Stinson. "The class was designing a bird feeder and this guy got so frustrated and threw his design idea in the bin. I fished it out and set him up with a laptop, a video camera and a pen.

"Where he'd originally only written nine words, he spoke for more than two minutes really eloquently about his design ideas, which he'd got from looking at TV programmes. His design was really superb."

Sound files and video clips are used throughout the project. "I wanted to make an additional safety feature on my bird feeder," explains the boy in an embedded sound-clip that accompanies the design drawing. "I wanted it to be safe from cats, but in no way to spook the birds. So I thought about having the birdfeeder sitting well away from the house, suspended from poles ... I got my idea from an episode of You've Been Framed – seeing a cat climb up a brick wall."

The corridors outside the technology room are chock full of children's designs, drawings, roadmaps and "virtual models" used in technology portfolios. One virtual model is the sitting-room of a house where the window works as a wide-screen TV in its own right.

"These are the kind of forward-thinking ideas we need," says Stinson. "This design makes a lot of sense: TVs in our sitting rooms are often very bulky and eat into the design space of the room, while in fact the biggest glass screen in the room is already 'naturally' there in the window, so why not base the design around that idea?"

Another innovation of Stinson's was to incorporate the technology that children use at home with what is already available in the classroom.

"Kids love Nintendo DSI, which uses audio files, photographs, write-on screens and a range of add-ons that can easily be imported on to a laptop and used in an e-portolio," he says. He uses an e-portfolio called The Life of a Sunflower by his five-year-old son to show how Nintendo can make it [healthily!] into the classroom.

"There are a lot of ICT skills built into these processes, too, so the kids are genuinely being stretched and challenged," he adds.

This year, Stinson won a Becta award for next generation learning and has previously won awards in the Microsoft European Innovative Teachers Forum awards.

"It is all quite overwhelming to be awarded for something you love doing and that comes naturally," he says. "I was just one of those kids who always wanted to be a teacher, and the biggest award I can get is the feeling that I am doing something right for my students."